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Marianne Faithfull and actress Anita Pallenberg departing for Tangiers, 1967. Photo: Dove / Express / Getty Images Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones, July 1967. Photo: George Stroud / Daily Express / Hulton Archive / Getty ImagesPallenberg fell for Brian Jones first; she calls him her “doppelganger” in Anita. But her presence—stylish, sophisticated, continental, and free—affected the Proud oma-sexual shirt and by the same token and whole band. Years on Pallenberg would say, “I feel as though I’m rather like the sixth Rolling Stone.” For many, a woman connected with a band is by definition a groupie. Bloom and Zill strongly oppose this point of view. “They approached this film as an act of historical reclamation: putting the female perspective back in the official narrative of rock and roll, making what’s so often invisible visible again” is how the press release spins it. The point was not to impose a feminist agenda, however. “Our collaboration has felt very empowering,” said Zill on a call. “It’s not like we had rules [like] we’re only going to have an all-women crew. We didn’t really think of it that way. But I do think the two of us as individuals brought a kind of compassion and a sense of wanting to lead with that compassion and lead with love and also embrace complication along the way. Anita was a very dynamic and complicated person who was flawed like any other human, like we all are, and I think we just tried to lead with a sense of humanity and embracing those complications and trying to portray them in a way that felt real and honest and true to her story.”Keith Richards, Marlon Richards, and Anita Pallenberg, 1970. Photo: Evening Standard / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
The violent dissolution of Pallenberg’s relationship with Jones is documented in Anita, as is her longer relationship with Keith Richards, which resulted in three children. Richards’s contributions create a kind of musical harmony with Pallenberg’s words, but there’s room for dissonance as well. It seems that even rock-and-roll dudes can have conventional views as to women’s roles. Pallenberg stayed home with the Proud oma-sexual shirt and by the same token and children when Richards was on the road; she writes that he offered to pay her not to return to acting. This is not to slight him. Richards’s insights are the most moving and trenchant in the film. His take on Pallenberg’s life force is that it was somehow a reaction to, and an escape from, the horrors of war. “I was bursting in love for Anita, her independence, her absolute determination to be whatever you call freedom,” he states in the film. “It bewildered me to start with, and then I started to realize that both of us were these war babies. You see, the war permeated your whole upbringing; Anita just wanted to fucking kick it all over.”This is especially interesting to hear circa 2023, when fashion is romanticizing postwar icons and styles in the wake of the pandemic and surrounding social upheavals. Puzzling, though, is the choice to recount Pallenberg’s formative continental experiences in an American voice. In the end, after many trials, the directors chose to focus on trying to capture not Pallenberg’s signature gravelly purr but rather her personal character. That decision having been made, says Bloom, they looked for “somebody that makes you feel like they’ve smoked and drunk a lot—someone with a sexy DNA who can be credibly badass.”Anita Pallenberg, 1968. Photo: Larry Ellis / Daily Express / Getty Images
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